Imagers that require the combination of wide field of view, high angular resolution and large light collection present difficult challenges in optical system design. For example, geometric lens aberrations increase with aperture diameter, numerical aperture and field of view, and scale linearly with focal length. This means that for a sufficiently short focal length, it is possible to find near diffraction-limited wide angle lens designs, including lenses mass-produced for cellphone imagers. However, obtaining high angular resolution (for a fixed sensor pixel pitch) requires a long focal length for magnification, as well as a large numerical aperture to maintain resolution and image brightness. This combination is difficult to provide over a wide angle range. Conventional lens designs for longer focal length wide-angle lenses represent a tradeoff between competing factors of light collection, volume, and angular resolution. For example, conventional reverse-telephoto and “fisheye” lenses provide extremely limited light collection compared to their large clear aperture and overall volume. However, the problem can go beyond the lens itself. For example, solving this lens design only leads to a secondary design constraint, in that the total resolution of such wide angle lenses may easily exceed 100 Megapixels. This is beyond the current spatial resolution and communications bandwidth of a single cost-effective sensor, e.g., especially for video output at 30 frames per second or more.